Microsoft’s Wikipedia dustup, the aftermath

In case you haven’t been following the story of Microsoft’s offer to pay a standards expert to change and “correct” certain Wikipedia articles, The Associated Press has a summary of what has happened so far. From the story:

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For more background, here’s the original post by Rick Jelliffe that brought light to the situation. To get a sense for the reaction, here’s the related Slashdot post.